I’ve been dealing with depression (and anxiety) for well over 5 years now. I’ve tried so many different medications and treatments with no apparent success. Inevitably, in the course of the treatment, the doctor will ask if I’m starting to feel better to see if it’s worth continuing the treatment, up the dose, or swap to something else. And… I never know what to say. If it’s not going to get dramatically better all of a sudden, I don’t really know how to recognize any incremental progress if it’s happening at all and without being able to do that, I might be passing on treatments that could have helped if I gave it more time.
So if you’ve been in this situation, how did you recognize progress? To the extent that you can put it into words, what did it feel like to slowly get better as you were treated?
This will likely get buried in all the other replies and you may well have already done what I suggest. But I have to say this because it doesn’t seem (from me skim reading anyway) that anyone else has really touched on this but have you been to a psychiatrist, ideally more than one? Done any research yourself beyond just the depression?
I ask because it seems like so many people just label themselves as having depression and that’s it. They don’t think about there being an underlying cause that has to be examined and worked on/healed, they only focus on that one depression symptom.
I’m a huge example of this, I’m in my early 30s and spent my whole adulthood so far thinking I just had depression and anxiety, that’s it. A few years ago I found out I had ADHD and thought that was the answer. But it really wasn’t what was causing bad feeling so much. And so over the past year I discovered I have CPTSD. Bad. A lot of trauma over my life that I wasn’t aware of and living as a shame-bound person was making me feel, think and behave the way I do, for the most part. Knowing that made it so much easier to know what path to take to heal.
And in contrast to what so many others have said here, I’ve healed for the most part and it happened very suddenly, over the course of a month or so actually. I won’t go into details as it’s long and not needed but yeah it came from going through a very horrible, abusive struggle for most of the past two years. I got out of it and did had many realisations about myself and life because of it. I saw that, despite what I thought all those years, I am a strong and good person and my life is, in fact, beautiful. It’s like I can hear music and see colour again after so many years without. I’ve never felt so genuinely happy and contended with myself and life. That’s simplifying it too, I could write an essay on my experience and the difference
There’s still more work to be done, of course, but I was blown away by how much change I’ve felt and in such a short space of time. This isn’t me saying you should seek out and also go through some terrible ordeal at all, of course. I just wanted to get across the importance of looking at potential underlying causes and mental conditions, not just trying to treat one or two symptoms. And also that healing isn’t always a slow, linear journey. There are people who have major depression and take a psychedelic once and they don’t feel that major depression ever again after. The human psyche is a powerful and not well understood thing that has a huge range of difference from person to person
Yes. Quite a few at this point. A few that just diagnosed and managed medications, but then there was also a clinic that did a brain scan to try to help figure things out, this is where I learned I was also autistic, but that didn’t really lead to anything useful. I also went to try TMS and Ketamine. Lately I thought that I might have ADHD, so I went to go get tested for that, but they decided that wasn’t it even if I did have some attention problems, they were just more related to the depression symptoms. After that, I’ve started doing ECT. I’m still in the early stages, but I’m starting to get to the number of treatments where people supposedly start feeling it helping and they of course ask me every time I go and I just never know what to say. I can’t really tell if I feel any different. At some point if it’s not helping I’m gonna have to stop because this is easily the most painful, disruptive treatment I’ve had so far. At least with the Ketamine I was basically just zonked out listening to music for like an hour. The ECT involves going to a hospital that’s like a half an hour away, not eating for 8 hours, not drinking for 2 hours, getting a needle stuck in my arm for anesthesia, then getting my brain zapped. I feel like shit the rest of the day. So if it’s not working, more than any other medication or treatment I’ve had, I need to end it. But I don’t want to miss my chance at what feels like the last thing that might help.
I will say my experience with ketamine and ect were both more distinctly positive than this. ect didn’t last as long, but both made it easier to weather the day and take care if my obligations. Nothing was curative, I still have problems with anhedonia, but they did both help. ECT didn’t help until they were doing it bilaterally with a high level of stimulus for me though. If you aren’t at that level yet, I’d recommend trying a bit longer.